Any owner of cats will know of what I speak. Cats come at dawn to sit on your bed. They may not nip your nose or inhale your breat...h or make a sound. They simply sit there and stare at you until you open one eyelid and spy them there about to drop dead for need of feeding. So it is with ideas. They come silently in the hour of trying to wake up and remember my name. The notions and fancies sit on the edge of my wits, whisper in my ears and then, if I don't rouse, give more than cats give: a good knock in the head, which gets me out and down to my typewriter before the ideas flee or die or both. In any event, I make the ideas come to me. I do not go to them. I provoke their patience by pretending disregard. This infuriates the latent creature until it is almost raving to be born and once born, nourished.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Living, just by itself--what a dirge that is! Life is a classroom and Boredom's the usher, there all the time to spy on you; whate...ver happens, you've got to look as if you were awfully busy all the time doing something that's terribly exciting--or he'll come along and nibble your brain.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Today's difference between Russia and the United States is that in Russia everybody takes everybody else for a spy, and in the Uni...ted States everybody takes everybody else for a criminal.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Books are the best things, well used; abused, among the worst. What is the right use? What is the one end, which all means go to e...ffect? They are for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book, than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

I shall never love England till she sues to us for help; and, in the meantime, the fewer triumphs she obtains, the better for all ...the parties. An Englishman in adversity is a very respectable character; he does not lose his dignity, but merely comes to a proper conceit of himself.... I seem to myself like a spy or a traitor, when I meet their eyes, and am conscious that I neither hope nor fear in sympathy with them, although (unless they detect me for an American by my aspect) they look at me in full confidence of sympathy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

"Will you walk into my parlor?" said the spider to the fly;"'Tis the prettiest little parlor that ever you did spy....The way into my parlor is up a winding stair,And I have many pretty things to show when you are there."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Five and twenty poniesTrotting through the dark--...Brandy for the Parson, 'Baccy for the Clerk;Laces for a lady, letters for a spy,And watch the wall, my darling, while the Gentlemen go by!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »